'Little Vera' Comes From Russia, With Sex

The Movie Page Movies

August 4, 1989|By Jay Boyar, Sentinel Movie Critic

The era of glasnost and perestroika can mean many things for the Soviet people.

It can mean a more critical approach to the country's history. It could mean a restructured economy. And now, apparently, it can also mean a 25-year-old beauty named Natalya Negoda exposing her breasts to a movie camera.

Negoda is the star of Little Vera, a new Soviet film that opens today at the Fashion Village 8. By American standards, the movie can't be called outrageous. True, its themes include alcoholism, drug abuse and promiscuity. And, yes, Negoda occasionally sheds her clothes in the film - once, for a steamy sexual encounter.

But here in the land of the free, we've seen this sort of thing on screen for 20 years or so. The point, however, is that people in the Soviet Union are not free to view a film like this - or, rather, that they were not.

Negoda's nude love scene is the first of its kind in a Soviet film. Times are definitely changing in Mother Russia, where Little Vera has played to an audience of more than 50 million and has become the country's all-time top-grossing film. (In the United States, it has grossed more than a million dollars since April, when it began opening in theaters here.)

''It's a tremendous testament to the openness of glasnost,'' says Robert Newman, vice president of distribution and marketing for International Film Exchange, the movie's U.S. distributor. ''In the Soviet Union, this is bold, bold stuff.''

Focusing on the sexier aspects of Little Vera is natural, especially considering that Negoda was featured on the cover of the May issue of Playboy and in a 10-page feature called ''That Glasnost Girl.'' And her overwhelming sexual presence is certainly one of the most striking things about Little Vera.

But to ignore the other revolutionary aspects of this picture is to miss the big picture. Considered as a whole, Little Vera is a probing look at the darker side of working-class life in the Soviet Union.

Director Vasily Pichul and screenwriter Maria Khmelik present characters whose lives are filled with frustration, and suggest that their problems are related to the system in which they live.

As played by Negoda, the Vera of the title is a Russian teen-ager who, like many teen-agers the world over, doesn't know where her life is headed. Asked if she has a goal, she replies ironically, ''We have a common goal . . . communism.''

Vera is also at something of a loss when it comes to her parents - limited people who try (unsuccessfully) to run her life. But when Vera meets a student named Sergei (Andrei Sokolov), everything changes. Vera's passion for Sergei gives meaning to her life . . . for a while, at least.

Little Vera tends to wander, and there are undoubtedly aspects of the film that only Russians understand. But American viewers will be impressed by the movie's underlying intelligence, and by the way its visual grittiness reflects its emotional tone.

Of course, it's unlikely that most of the Americans who have already gone to see the movie would have done so if not for Natalya Negoda's love scene. That's show biz, as we capitalists say.

''My God!'' thought Newman, the first time he saw the film. ''Maybe the time will be right for the first Soviet sex symbol.''

- 6 PLUS 1 EQUALS 6: The UC6 movie house at 12255 University Blvd. has always had six screens, as the ''6'' in its name suggests. Today, however, the theater will unveil a seventh screen, which is housed in a brand-new 155-seat auditorium.

Does this mean that the theater will now be known as the UC7?

Don't bet the popcorn money on it.

''It was hard enough to get them moviegoers to know UC6,'' says William Korenbrot, division manager for Litchfield Theaters, which operates the theater.